Pompeii
by EmmaAndKeyboard
Summary: "Had Talia only been her mother, Cora would have sprinted back. She would have returned to fight, tear flesh and skin until either her pack was safe or she died for them. Cora is a cub, but cubs can be fierce, too. Daddy said so. Talia is not only her mother, though. Talia is her Alpha, and when your Alpha wants you to run, you run." Aka I wrote Cora backstory with the vault.
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

Derek won't take her. He lived there for months, but it must be different, Cora thinks, to go with someone who remembers it like he does. Not the burnt out shell before her.

"You okay?" Boyd asks as she slams the door to Derek's car harder than is strictly necessary.

"Fine." She spits the word out like it's wolfsbane.

Technically, she could have come alone, but she doesn't feel like running tonight and has no driver's license, at least not in the United States. If she's being completely honest, it's probably a good thing she isn't alone. Boyd's no stranger. Three months locked in a vault with someone forms a sort of irrevocable bond, and other than Derek he's the person in this town who feels the most like pack.

Pack. She closes her eyes. It's easy to conjure up the smell of her family, the smell that marks home, but impossible to tell if it's real (burned, six years old, but real) or a figment of her imagination. Her eyes shoot back open.

"We played in the woods," she tells him, tilting her head toward the forest that surrounds them. "Hide-and-go seek, sometimes. Trained there when we were older."

Boyd doesn't comment, only nods. Yes, it's a good thing she came with him.

"We were supposed to howl if we got lost. These woods go on for miles and miles, but our mom said as long as the woods smelled like pack, they would be able to hear us."

"Your mom. Was she-?"

"Yeah. She was the best Alpha in the world. I'm not just saying that because she was my mom either, everyone knew it."

There's a long pause, not comfortable, but natural. The bird noises are different here. The way the wind moves through the trees is familiar, but the absent tinkling of Laura's wind chimes (a sixth grade art project) is grating.

The walk to the house from where the driveway used to be is short, but she takes it slow, letting herself remember.

She used to have cousins, some human, some not, but all of them knew what a nip and a growl meant and all of them could run- fast. When you live with wolves, you run with them. That's just the way it is.

Cora's mother was powerful, protective, and endlessly gracious. Laura was raised to be her mother made over. Cora got a little more wiggle room, but she remembered worshipping the other women in her house. The week before the fire Laura and her Aunt Kelly taught her how to groom her mother's wolf, a careful ritual for formal meetings with other packs. She remembers how her hands shook as she combed through her mother's fur, not out of fear, but awe.

Her father was human, and he was always in either the kitchen or the living room, cooking or reading. On Saturday nights he gathered the littlest children and showed them how to bake as he made up stories, letting them add characters and plot points as they pleased.

In the end, though, it's not her mother or her father or even her little cousins who cause her to break. As they approach the doorway she thinks of Peter, the awkward uncle who never really fit in with the kids or the adults, and how he showed her to climb the staircase, hanging off the edge and jumping on the next person who comes through the doorway.

The urge to howl is sudden. Boyd startles, then backs away to give her space as the howling fades to a sob deep within her chest. It too is familiar, an ache she's had for six years that will never truly go away.

The moon is high in the sky when Cora speaks again.

"He was always howling."

"Your dad?"

"No, Derek. He always got lost in the woods."

The smell of smoke is just as old as the smell of her family, but it hasn't faded a bit.

"I never did."


	2. Chapter 1

Mom always told her to hide- hide and heal. She was the youngest of them all, only eleven. Auntie Evelyn was pregnant, but that baby didn't count yet.

When the smoke and howls started, she was in the woods, alone. One voice rose above all the others, not an utterance of pain or panic, but an order. Run. Hide. Don't stop.

Had Talia only been her mother, Cora would have sprinted back. She would have returned to fight, tear flesh and skin until either her pack was safe or she died for them. Cora was a cub, but cubs can be fierce, too. Daddy said so.

Talia was not only her mother, though. Talia was her Alpha, and when your Alpha wants you to run, you run.

She runs. She hides. She even heals, as much as one can.

Cora started running on a Tuesday at ten o'clock, when the wind was a gentle breeze and it felt as if nothing could ever touch her. She's never really stopped.

The floor of the vault is cold, and it makes sure no part of her is ever warm enough. Shivering makes her flinch as it pulls at her still-lingering injuries from Kali.

Across the room, Erica and Boyd are huddled close together. They've been here longer than her. A month, Boyd said.

"We didn't shift," Boyd tells her. "The full moon was last week, right?"

"It's the walls," she says, her first words in hours. "Can't you feel them?"

They emit an aura that prickles and jabs and squeezes at her chest. It's driving her out of her skin, but she cannot shift. She is confined to this body, and that will consume her. Here, in this vault, Cora finally feels like drifting away.

She was so close. So close.

It's midnight before Cora stops running. She's been shifted for hours now, but even her werewolf stamina isn't enough to keep her moving.

She's on a road now. The woods are dangerous at night for a wolf like her. An Omega. She is weak. Others will be able to smell the grief and fear on her and she won't stand a chance.

Cars pass her, but they can only see what's in front of their headlights. She needs somewhere human to sleep, even if her every instinct is to get as far away from Beacon Hills as possible.

The positioning of the moon tells her it's almost three when she finally stumbles across what she needs: a blue bus sign. She sinks to the ground, trying to hold on to her adrenaline, because she knows the second it fades she won't be able to function.

The bus clatters down the road what feels like hours later. The driver gives Cora an odd look as she hoists herself up onto the steps, and she runs her fingers across her teeth and along the sides of her face like her father taught her to. No. Still human.

"Well then. Are you going to pay?" the driver asks after an awkward pause.

"I-I-" she stammers. She's never taken the bus before, how was she supposed to know they cost money. Aren't buses public?

The driver looks her up and down. "You under twelve?"

"I'm eleven!" she practically shouts. Hold it together, keep holding it together…

The driver nods at a sign behind Cora. "Kids ride free."

She nods her thanks and stumbles down the brightly-lit aisle, in sharp contrast with the darkness surrounding the vehicle. Wolves love the dark. Cora has never been afraid of it before, but at the moment it seems like it's an abyss waiting to swallow her whole.

The few other occupants of the bus stare at her as she slides into a seat, but she's asleep before it occurs to her that she should care.

Erica and Boyd speak in hushed whispers, even though she could easily listen if she wanted to. For the most part, she ignores them. All she wants is for Kali to come back and finish off what she started.

The moon rises and falls three more times. They can sense it even if they aren't affected by it. On the fourth day, her wish comes true.

Erica growls even though she is powerless. Cora can respect courage. Stupidity? Not so much. Kali swipes at the Beta, eyes glinting red, before turning around to face Cora.

"What about you, little one? Are you just going to sit there? I though you would be more of a fighter than that."

Cora glares. Kali's claws make soft ticking noises as she strides across the room.

"You do remember me, don't you?"

Tick. Tick.

"You couldn't have been more than what- five?"

"I was nine." Her voice cracks not from fear, but lack of use.

Tick. Tick. Tick. She's only a foot away now, and she stops.

"Nine? You were tiny for nine. A runt, really. The littlest Hale."

A claw is at Cora's throat before she can think to react.

"I liked you better as a kid, I think. Your potential didn't grow with you."

There is one more soft tick, and then flesh tears.

A hand on her shoulder jolts Cora awake, and she forces a few deep breaths before she opens her eyes- a transformation in public is the last thing she needs.

"You're awfully young to be riding alone, little lady," a rough voice mumbles into her ear.

Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone. The world outside the window is still shrouded in darkness, but now there are pinpricks of light as they pass gas stations and 24-hour drive thus.

"A girl like you shouldn't be alone on a night like tonight." He smells like alcohol. The scent is burning her nostrils.

"Leave me alone," she says, strong and firm. Wolves don't have to worry about men. If Laura was here, she would rip this man limb from limb.

But Laura isn't here. Laura is most likely dead, hunted down by whoever killed the rest of her family. Cora's mother's howl is still sounding in her ears. She is not a Hale anymore, she is the Hale, and Hales don't let anyone whisper in their ear and grab their knee.

What can she do?

Her hand shoots out suddenly, almost werewolf-quick, pulling the cord hanging from the top of the bus.

Ding. "Stop requested," an automated voice says. "Please remain seated until the bus comes to a complete stop."

The man doesn't make to grab her as she pushes past him, nor does he follow her out into the night, but she runs anyway.

When she wakes up again, the cold of the floor is welcome in comparison to the fire of her skin.

"You're not healing," calls a voice, almost tentatively. Erica, Cora remembers.

"You're not born, are you?" she asks, the realization coming slowly.

Boyd answers. "Born?"

"A wolf."

"No. We were turned."

Cora pushes herself up slowly, leaning back onto the wall of the vault. The itch joins the cacophony of senses overwhelming her.

"Your Alpha is doing a shitty job," she tells her two cellmates, trying to distract herself. They're closer to her now, almost as if they were watching over her while she was unconscious. "You heal slower when the wounds are from an Alpha. Everyone knows that."

Boyd looks at Erica, and Cora realizes she's missing something.

"What?" she asks.

"About our Alpha…" Boyd begins.

"Yeah, they're doing a piss poor job," she grits out as a new wave of pain washes over left side.

There's a beat of silence, one of those moments where the universe takes a deep breath to prepare for what's ahead- to teeter on the side of the die as it decides whether or not to fall.

"Did Kali call you a Hale?"

A boarded up Shell station is where she finally makes her home for the night. Even battered and exhausted, it's easy for her to break in.

The store is covered in a thick layer of dust- no one has probably stepped inside in years. The shelves remain, though the inventory has long since been cleared out. Cora stretches out between the third and fourth row, her body mostly hidden but with the door in her line of sight.

Her running shorts and t-shirt are soaked with sweat and now covered in dirt and dust- tomorrow she'll need to find some sort of a thrift shop. Maybe swiping something from Target will work. Could she hide clothes in her training bra? Probably not.

Buses are out of the question for now. Stealing a car would work if she were a few years older- Peter taught her to drive when she was nine, but there's no way she could pass as sixteen if she got pulled over.

Her mind is racing now- she should be crying, she should be angry, she should be doing anything but laying here calmly. Laura, Mom, Derek, Dad, Peter, Kelly, Evelyn, Brent, Derek, Olivia, Fiona, little unborn cousin, Bailey- all of them dead.

Cora's breath starts to quicken and she moves her hand to her head, smoothing her hair down over and over, trying to calm herself in the way that her mother does. She turns over away from the door- slowly, strongly, and lets her thoughts fade away into a numbness.

As the moon fades into daylight outside, she traces spirals in the ash until she can hear birds chirping.


End file.
